The Time of No One

By Tom De Poto

In this story centered around historical events, an American priest arrives in Rome in 1943 and finds the city in turmoil. The prime minister has been exiled, the king has fled the country, and Rome's native son, Pope Pius XII, is trying to stay out of the fray of World War II as Nazi soldiers pour into the Eternal City, threatening the pontiff and rounding up Jews. Without leadership, Romans called this period il tempo dal nessuno, or the time of no one. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Postiglione Publishing
• Release date: Mar 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386231875

Tom De Poto

Tom De Poto is a retired journalist and college educator. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, and is most proud of his grown children and their children, too.

Book preview

Author’s Note: This is a work of fiction built around actual events during 1943 and 1944 in Rome. The dates on which key events took place are correct to the best of my knowledge, as are the off-stage actions of figures such as Pope Pius XII, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Gen. Wolff and others. Ernst von Weisacker, who plays a larger role in this story, is also historically accurate to the best of my knowledge. His son, Richard, became the first elected president of Germany after the war. All other characters are the creations of the author.

Cover design by Alex Beaufort, alexbeaufort.com

Copyright 2019, by Tom De Poto

SUNDAY, APRIL 18, 1943. Rome

MY DREAMS ARE SHORT and infrequent and often linked to feelings of being trapped. One that recurs regularly goes back to when I was three or four years old. We didn’t have a bath tub in our apartment  so my mother washed me in the kitchen sink. In the dream, I kneel in the sink and bend forward all the way so my nose is between my knees. Then my mother pivots the faucet over my back so she can rinse off the soap suds.

In this dream, though, she leaves the room to get something and I can’t get up. I’m folded in three – thighs over calves, chest over knees. I can’t straighten my legs because the sink isn’t big enough, and I can’t lay forward for the same reason. I call out, Mom! Mom! but I can’t raise my head and I know the water soon will be up to my nose and I’m stuck.

Small animals must have dreams like that too. Squirrels, for example, can’t walk backwards. If they crawl into a pipe that’s closed on the other end, there’s no way out for them. That’s when I wake.

My name is Federico – Freddy to my English-speaking friends – Delluci. I was born in Rome in 1917 and lived here my entire life.

I understand five languages – Italian (of course), English, German, French and Spanish – but I can speak none because of an unfortunate accident that I’ll explain later.

As a child I wasn’t a particularly good student and that can be blamed in part, I guess, on the Italian school system at the time. No one took it seriously, not the students, not the parents. Only those kids whose parents had money went to private schools and learned about the classics and proper grammar and all of that. The rest of us were educated by the kids we hung around with.

I wasn’t liked by the other boys my age and it wasn’t long before they totally left me on my own. I didn’t like them. They understood that and responded in kind. When they played soccer in the street,  I’d walk to another block. They didn’t ask me to play, and I didn’t want to anyway. To me, they were just boys. They could offer me nothing. They pretended to be grownups, yelled and gesticulated like adults, but they gave off foul pubescent odors. Real adults smelled better, especially the younger ones, men in their late teen years or early 20s who had grown up on the streets. And they seemed to like me too. They let me hang around. I learned a lot of dirty jokes from them and foul language that upset my parents and puzzled the boys my age. They’d share their wine with me sometimes, and their cigarettes and their stories.

The only time I didn’t want to be around them was when there were women. When that happened, my friends ignored me, or teased me. I didn’t understand why they would choose women over me? Besides breasts and long hair, what was the attraction? They didn’t play sports, they didn’t roughhouse, tell off-color jokes or insult anyone.

Now and again the boys my age would ask me to explain what happens between men and women. All I could tell them was what the men told me.

Nothing but trouble. Never trust a woman. They’ll cut off your balls when you’re sleeping and put them in tomato sauce.

It was usually around then the mothers would call out. Lorenzo! Mario! How many times have I told you not to talk with that boy! Come home right now!

I’d return to my refuge – my grown-up friends who’d let me join them as they walked around the city smoking cigarettes and insulting everyone who was just beyond earshot. I didn’t always comprehend what they said, but it felt good that they thought I did.

After some nights when they’d passed the evening in a tavern and shared with me some wine, they’d set out to steal something from a palazzo. Boredom, I’d suspect now. But at the time it exhilarated me.

They can afford to give something to us, Marcello would say if I hesitated. Marcello was the unelected leader of the guys I hung with. His hair was blonde and curled like the smoke from a cigarette.

It’s OK, he’d say. They have plenty more. Sometimes the guys would just want some food from a kitchen, and so would I.

On other nights they’d want some silverware that they could sell, or maybe a piece of jewelry from the bedroom. Not a lot, and nothing big. Just small things. I was slim and could fit in places they couldn’t, and I was fast. It made me valuable to them, something I cherished, and so I did what they wanted. When I’d return they’d whisper their cheers and applause.

Only once did I get caught and I didn’t even get what I was sent in for, which were some gilded photograph frames that Marcello saw the owners purchase the week before. He admired them and thought they’d be worth more if he had them.

I went through the rooms of the house quickly looking for them, but couldn’t find them on the main floor. I headed upstairs to the bedrooms when one of the house servants spotted me. No one told me there would be someone in the house. I ran down the stairs, across the parlor and out onto the terrace. I leapt the balustrade. I skittered through the garden to the wall, jumped it and landed on the sidewalk, almost into the arms of a policeman. When I got to my feet, I saw Marcello and the others had vanished.

The cop brought me to the police station, where I screamed and cried just like a kid – which I was. I made such a ruckus they held me only for a little while before letting me go home.

When I turned 16, I took a job on a sailing ship that left from Rome and sailed through the Mediterranean, around Spain to France and England before returning home. I made this passage several dozen times in the next few years, learning languages along the way. I absorbed more by being aboard a 70-foot boat then I ever did in a school room. But the issue of women still puzzled me.

Sailors would board early in the morning before departure looking sullen after having spent a night with at least one woman, if married, or more if single. On that first day at sea, they’d be wistful. I love you Mira, or I love you Sophia. By the second day the amorous laments slowed and by the third they were sharing stories about what wretches women were, how they ruined their lives, and how the men had abused them in return. This is when I felt the closest bond to my shipmates. With each harbor we stopped in we’d load on more liquor – sweet Spanish port, fiery French cognac, British gin – and the tales of how they hated and yet incomprehensibly longed for women grew worse.

And when they landed, what was the first thing they wanted to do? Of course. Find a woman and start the cycle all over again. The conversations were interspersed with some of the best dirty jokes in the world. Like I said, it was a puzzlement.

By 1939, 1940, Italy was at war again. People thought we could restore the Roman Empire. The Germans thought they were also rebuilding an empire. Together, they figured, we could rule the world through a combined empire. I knew the idea was laughable but when shipboard jobs dried up because it wasn’t safe to sail a commercial vessel any more I was drafted into the army.

I was stationed at Forte Braschi in the Trionfale district in the southwestern part of the city. I didn’t last too long, however, and I never saw any real fighting because my regiment leader happened to be Marcello from the old neighborhood.

Federico! he said when he first saw me. I didn’t recognize him immediately because he had cleaned up and was in uniform. My little buddy, how are you? Look how you’ve grown!

I’ll admit my reaction didn’t match his greeting. We hadn’t parted on great terms. He had a girlfriend at the time and moved on with his life, leaving me behind, an afterthought.

The one thing that time hadn’t changed, however, was what he wanted from me, a petty thief who did his bidding. And to my fault, I imagined I could reclaim the friendship I thought we once had if I did what he asked.

And so we started again. Federico, can you get us some rations from the kitchen? Federico, can you steal some weekend passes for us? Federico, my boots are hurting. Can you get me a new pair?

We continued where we had left off and, again, I felt what I thought was the warmth of his friendship. Federico, I would be lost without you.

Until the day he asked for more ammunition for his handheld Beretta.

Why do you need more bullets for that? I asked.

For target practice, he said.

But they give you ammo for that.

Yes, but maybe I want to practice some more, OK?

I didn’t really care why he needed it, I simply understood that he did.

Breaking into the armory was not easy, especially at night. That’s when it was most heavily guarded. So I decided to do it during the midafternoon, when the few guards stationed there might be sleepy or easily distracted.

Luckily our supply clerk was a friend who owed me a favor because I’d been able to get extra cheese for him, and so I asked him to leave the rear window of the armory unlocked the next time he was there.

When I passed by that afternoon, I offered a little prayer of thanks when I found the window unlatched. I slid it open and pulled myself through. Inside I quickly found the boxes of ammunition and put a dozen of them in my pockets.

Say what you will about fate, but the scenario that played itself outside the Rome villa when I went in to steal some picture frames repeated itself now. As I slipped out the back window, there stood a military police officer. He looked stunned as I came through the window like a baby leaving the womb. When I stood before him, he saw the bulges in my pockets. He jumped on me, wrestled me to the ground and put his own Beretta at the back of my skull. Within moments I was in handcuffs.

I could have wailed and carried on like I did the last time I was captured, but I knew it would be pointless now.

Hours later in the lockup, Marcello came to visit me.

If you tell anyone about me, I’ll have you killed. Do you understand?

Marcello, I don’t owe you anything anymore. And besides, this may be my ticket out of this stupid army. I’ll serve some time, get three squares a day, and then they’ll let me go home.

I’m your commanding officer, he shouted.

Don’t you see, I said, when they kick me out, you won’t be anything to me? So what do I care.

I heard his boots, the ones I’d gotten for him, echo down the hall and then the door slam.

Of course I’d never rat on him. That’s betrayal. That’s unworthy, dishonorable. I lay on my bunk and decided to wait patiently until justice played itself out. If the court martial officers realized I wasn’t issued a Beretta but Marcello was, they could figure it out for themselves. But I wouldn’t point right at him. It’s unbecoming.

I dozed off and on. It’s such a peaceful experience to nap, wake, nowhere to be, slip away again and dream nonsense words.

The sound of my cell door opening woke me. I opened my eyes to see three men at the foot of my bed. They wore bandanas over their faces and civilian clothes. I made no move to sit up but simply stared at them. One came around and grabbed me by the back of the hair, another pulled my mouth open from my bottom teeth, and a third ran a blade over my tongue, slicing it out before they left.

My first reaction was that the pain wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. The second was the sensation of blood filling my mouth.

And then the pain struck fully. I could taste my beating heart.

A trauma like this can divide a life in two: there was before, and then after. Better, and worse. In this instance, though, slightly better followed than what had come before, which was a life of petty crime, no true friends, unacknowledged loneliness.

After my discharge I returned home, tongueless and disgraced. Whenever there was a theft in the neighborhood I was the first one police came to visit. One can grow accustomed to it. But at least I no longer had to serve in that army or be Marcello’s little thief.

I worked for a while with Pietro Pucci in his shoe repair shop. Pietro didn’t talk much, he liked the quiet, and I worked in silence except for the occasional tapping of tacks into leather. He dealt with the customers, and I stayed at the work table. Whatever sense of young rebellion I’d cultivated in the preceding years was sliced from me. A life of silence means you don’t have to engage and it frees you to watch. That’s what they say about people who lose their eyes: their other senses make up for the absence. In my case, I became a better observer.

I am embarrassed by good people. I don’t know how to behave around them. I’m still tempted to make fun of them or do stupid things to see how they react. But when I found my friend Elvin, he was different. He’s a good person, an American, cold and clear by nature who came to Rome to be an art dealer. He said the great machine of progress he saw in America brought nothing but noise and chaos and fouled the human soul in its smelly wake. That’s why he studied art. It’s slow, he said. And expressive and enlightening – things he could no longer find in his homeland.

His specialty was the Renaissance, which of course began here in Italy. As Elvin said, the art from that period was based on humanism, and not religion or capitalism. Painters used fewer heavenly creatures and painted more real people doing real things. When he explained it to me like that, I saw it clear as day. Of course I’d been surrounded by art, living in Rome, but I could never differentiate one period from the other. Now, with Elvin’s guidance, I saw the different styles, and the varying messages each intended to send.

Elvin lived in spheres of knowledge where others did not. I was honored he let me into his.

When we met for the first time at Pietro’s shoe repair shop he told me my eyes seemed lost in pain. I was immediately drawn to him

The need for speech stayed with me long after my tragedy. Over coffee one day he promised to be my voice. I accepted that, embraced it even. He was uncommonly compassionate toward me.

But now, through this book, I get to speak on my own again. It has been decades since the Germans took over Rome and then fled in disgrace. It is a good time share what I watched and what I learned.

Let me start by telling you first about the other American, the priest who came to Rome in the summer of 1943.

SATURDAY, MAY 15, 1943, New Jersey

FATHER WILLIAM DUNN found out he’d be coming to Rome when the letter arrived in the afternoon post. Mrs. McCormack, the housekeeper for the rectory, took it from the mailbox with the others and brought them inside to sort. Correspondence relating to house management such as bills, etc. she handled. The other mail she put on a glass plate in the hallway. But one letter stood out. The envelope was whiter than the rest.

It was addressed to The Rev. William Dunn. She checked the stamp. It had a picture of a man with woman-like hair and Latin words. The stamp read Poste Vaticane across the top. The return address had an imprint of a three-tiered miter above two keys – one gold, one silver – which were loosely tied with a red rope.

She took that letter from the pile. She wasn’t happy to see it, but it shouldn’t be left with the rest. It should be brought directly to Father Dunn. She mounted the stairs to his room even though she knew he wouldn’t be there. It was Father Dunn’s day to be on call and he was at the hospital making sick-bed visits. She thought of leaving the envelope on his bed, but no. Pillow? No. Desk? Would he see it there amid the clutter?

She left his room, closed the door and slid it underneath. She turned, squared, and walked down the hall and back down the stairs.

THE THREE PRIESTS WHO shared the residence gathered every evening in the dining room at about 5:30. The eldest, Monsignor Owens, usually the first to arrive, sat at the head of the table. His hair was white and rolled back from his forehead in waves. Father Golding sat to his right, his demeanor never as cheery as the monsignor’s. Father Dunn was the youngest and predictably the last to arrive every evening without fail.

Once they were seated, Mrs. McCormack brought in the tray with that night’s dinner – meat loaf, mashed potatoes with a gravy boat by their side, boiled string beans – and placed it on the table.

The monsignor led the three men in saying grace and after they had blessed themselves and raised their heads, monsignor saw Mrs. McCormack standing stock still in the room with her hands folded in front of her.

What is it, Mrs. McCormack? the monsignor asked.

Father Dunn got a letter today, she said.